Aesthetics and Orientalism in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Letters

Abstract

I confess I am malicious enough to desire that the World shou'd see to how much better purpose the LADYS Travel than their LORDS, and that whilst it is surfeited with Male Travels, all in the same Tone, and stuft with the same Trifles, a Lady has the skill to strike out a New Path, and to embellish a worn-out Subject with variety of fresh and elegant Entertainment. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) was well educated for a woman of her day, though largely self-taught. Her incisive intellect was attuned to the nuances of art, literature, and criticism in Augustan England. She was a contemporary of Congreve, Shaftesbury, and Addison, whose tragedy Cato she was asked to critique in manuscript, not to mention her vexed relationship with Pope. The letters she wrote throughout her long, adventurous life persistently thematize aesthetic concerns: the visual allure of sensuous surfaces as well as the hierarchies of power that complicate the relations between spectator and spectacle, aesthetic subject and aesthetic object. We have glimpsed the assumptions held by Montagu's male peers about these matters. Addison reserves the “Polite Imagination” to privileged men, dismisses “the Vulgar” and relegates “Fair ones” to the margins of the aesthetic sphere, while Shaftesbury implicitly aligns aesthetic contemplation with property ownership as masculine prerogatives. Such attitudes are the context for Montagu's innovative approach to both travel and aesthetics. Montagu's husband was appointed British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in 1716, affording her a rare opportunity for contact with a distant and misunderstood culture.